Guild Wars 2

Vital Shot and Crossfire are good examples, Vital Shot being even slower then Crossfire.

Crossfire has a 0.54 second delay and Vital Shot has a 0.74 second delay. Both of these need to be 0.5 second delays.

+1 – I also found this out today after some posts on the Thief forum.

I know there’s rounding involved in the tooltips, but it’s actually quite disturbing, especially comparing those two skills – in theory they are near identical – Crossfire has 300 more range, and 3 sec bleed, while Vital Shot has 4 sec bleed. However, in reality, Vital Shot is significantly less powerful.

ZenonSeth.5739:

+1 – I also found this out today after some posts on the Thief forum.

I know there’s rounding involved in the tooltips, but it’s actually quite disturbing, especially comparing those two skills – in theory they are near identical – Crossfire has 300 more range, and 3 sec bleed, while Vital Shot has 4 sec bleed. However, in reality, Vital Shot is significantly less powerful.

Rangers get 40% of there damage from pets as well, Vital Shot should be faster and deal more damage. However ranger shortbow pretty much blows thieve’s P/P out of the water in every aspect. I don’t think Ranger Shortbow should be nerfed however, I think its delay should be BUFFED.

We all know Vital Shot was meant to do 1/3rd the physical damage of Bleeding Shot, do 2/3rds of the bleeding, and fire just as slow.

But yes, a lot of the damage and debuff durations of skills were built off the front load of the attack delay, but are really forced on the back load of the animation. Every class is affected, and I wish they would fix this. The most heavily affected, of course, is thief Pistols. They have fractional damage under the assumption of rapid fire, but have slow animations (we’re talking 50% cast times being added, which is not joke), so they’re just stuck with… fractional damage period.

Unfortunately I don’t see them taking the effort of changing animation timings. This would be the best fix as it stops the option of animation clipping for serious delays on long combos like Guardian hammer auto (so any animation clip would constitute an interrupt as it would still be in the skill timer). But unless they do that, they seriously need to recalculate the balance of every single move in the game based on animation times and change the skill timings to match to prevent animation clipping.

0.74 seconds for a skill that is suppose to be 1/2 second cast is just a plain lie. At least it should say 3/4 seconds – unless they round DOWN – in which case that’s even worse, since it means every skill out there could potentially be 1/4 of a second longer than given.

I don’t know why animation needs to take precedence here – animation should never take precedence (though I believe ANet already knows this). I’m not sure what system they use to animate the characters, but most animation speeds can be controlled.

Bottom line, if a skill says 1/2 second, I don’t expect it to be 0.74 seconds cast. And if the balancing was based on that 1/2 second assumption, like it looks like it was, then… wow